Nujeen : One Girl's Incredible Journey from War-Torn Syria in a Wheelchair by Nujeen Mustafa with Christina Lamb (Harper)

“I don’t collect stamps or coins or football cars - I collect facts. Most of all I like facts about physics and space, particularly string theory. Also about history and dynasties like the Romanovs. And controversial people like Howard Hughes and J. Edgar Hoover”. 

Nujeen Mustafa says she hates the word refugee more than any other word in the English language. She says what it really means is “a second-class citizen with a number scrawled on your hand or printed on a wristband, who everyone wishes would somehow go away.”  In the year 2015, Nujeen “became a fact, a statistic, a number.” As much as she likes facts she goes on to say that “we are human beings.” 

Nujeen is the story of one girl’s incredible journey from war-torn Syria in a wheelchair. It is written by Nujeen with Christina Lamb who was the coauthor of I Am Malala. Nujeen says her name means “new life”. Her parents already had four girls and four boys so her birth was rather unexpected. The age difference between her and her eldest brother is twenty-six years. 

The family first lived in a town called Manbij in northern Syria, close to the border with Turkey. She calls her mother Ayee and her father Yaba. They are not Arabic words. Nujeen is a Kurd. 

As one of the few Kurdish families living in a town that was mostly Arab who she says “looked down on us and called our area the Hill of the Foreigners”. The family was forced to speak Arabic. They could only use their own language, Kurmanji, in their home. It was most difficult for her parents who were illiterate and didn’t speak Arabic. 

Nujeen was born with cerebral palsy. Her family moved to Aleppo so she could get better healthcare than she did in Manbij. Life was a little better. She even taught herself to speak a little English by watching the American soap opera Days of Our Lives.

The Syrian Civil War started after the Arab Spring Protests (a series of anti-government protests against corruption and economic stagnation). However, unlike other Arab nations that managed to depose their corrupt government officials, the President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, used violent force to suppress the demonstrators. 

This led to the Syrian Refugee Crisis where millions of Syrians left their country or have been displaced within their own nation. Nujeen is one of the millions of asylum seekers. She is an extraordinary young woman who escaped from Syria in a wheelchair. This is her story. 

Nujeen is a Kurdish Syrian refugee who traveled from the historic city of Aleppo to escape war and civil unrest to Germany where her brother lives. She made the perilous journey in a wheelchair with her sister, who pushed her most of the way. Since leaving Aleppo, the girls travel more than 3,500 miles across nine countries from war to peace—a journey to a new life, just like her name. It takes them a month after they left Gaziantep in Turkey where her parents remained. 

The trip cost nearly 5,000 Euros, mostly paid by her elder brothers who were already living abroad. Nujeen and her sister travel from Turkey to the Greek island of Lesbos in a dinghy. Then they go to Athens on the mainland of Greece, continuing to Macedonia and Serbia, with hopes of going through Hungary as well. However, their luck seems to run out as Hungary has closed its borders to all refugees. They have to change their plans. Their journey takes them through Croatia, Slovenia and Austria before they finally reach Germany. 

Nujeen and other refugees not only leave the comforts of their home, they have to deal with smugglers, bribe corrupt officials, and are persecuted by right-wing fanatics. Yet Nujeen retains her sense of dignity. She’s an inspiration and a role model who shows the world that refugees are not all criminals and will contribute to society if that society lets them. 

The Syrian refugee crisis still continues and Bashar al-Assad is still President of Syria. Now that the news is focusing on Russian aggression against Ukraine, people are seeming to forget the crimes committed by al-Assad and his regime. Why he is still in power is a mystery to me. Why can’t the international community depose people like al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, and all the other tyrants around the world. Until we rid the world of these people, the world will never be a safe place. ~Ernie Hoyt

Ma and Me: A Memoir by Putsata Reang (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Ma is a woman with a “face spangled with light.” She took her children away from Cambodia’s genocide and brought them to a small town in Oregon, a place where she and her husband found a house and established their reputations as a leading Khmer family in the area. “Use your brain, not your back,” she tells her children, and shows them the consequences of ignoring her advice by taking them to the fields of berry farmers and harvesting crops for money every summer. Quickly they all learn to listen to Ma. All of them succeed in moving far from lives of physical labor.

On the ship that carries her family from Cambodia to a refugee camp, Ma holds tight to Putsata, her dying baby whom she manages to keep alive. “My first feeling was flight,” Putsata says of the memories she has inherited from that voyage. When she turns two, Ma teaches her a game, “Run and hide,” one that the little girl plays so often that it “forms into habit,” her “very best skill.”

“Both of us are storytellers,” Putsata  says. Ma carries a storehouse of Cambodian fables and myth, while her daughter becomes a journalist who quests for facts that might hold truth. The presiding fact in Putsata’s life is one she’s always known: Ma is the savior and Putsata is the saved. “I owed Ma my life,” and in return Putsata “tried to live an immaculate life.” She goes off to work in Cambodia, becomes fluent in Khmer, helps her relatives who survived the Pol Pot years. She turns herself into a model daughter and “Ma made a myth of me.” Nothing seems to shatter that myth, not even when Putsata tells Ma that she’s gay, right up until the day that she discovers that her mother never believed that disclosure was true.

When she finds that she needs to choose between the woman she will marry and Ma, Putsata becomes “the single flaw in the beautiful fiction of a family Ma spun for the Khmer community.” Without bathos or drama, she conveys the agony that racks her mother and herself in the moment when long after their voyage to safety ended, “Ma had cast me overboard.”

Memoirs have become a tiresome genre but Putsata has set an impossible standard of excellence with hers. Intertwining Ma’s folktales with the story of her mother’s life and her own, she burnishes this with the language of a poet. When her abusive father attacks one of her young cousins, the blood seeping from the child “lying like a broken bird on the floor”  is “the color of fresh berries.” When she visits the death chambers of Tuol Sleng, she feels “the million pinpricks of guilt, shame, and sorrow…calcify in me like a new bone.” The Cambodian monsoons strike as if “through a single slit in the sky, an entire sea crashed onto the land.”

Whether she’s a child working in Oregon’s strawberry fields, “zombie-like and without complaint,” or an adult alone in the country of her birth, seeing it as “an entire nation of the walking wounded,” “so physically beautiful and yet stained with such a grim past,” Putsata takes her readers with her, imbuing them with her sense of beauty, her scalding honesty, her refusal to indulge in self-pity, and her extraordinary history.~Janet Brown

The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger (Penguin)

The Newlyweds is a modern day romance novel. The author was inspired to write the story after meeting a woman on a plane. The woman’s name was Farah Deeba Munni, a Bangladeshi woman who met her husband on an international marriage-broker website. 

Amina Mazid is a twenty-four-year old Muslim woman who meets her husband, George Stillman, online. George is an engineer who works in a suburb of New York City. After a very short courtship, with George’s promise of converting to Islam, she moves from her native country of Bangladesh to live with George in a new house he has recently bought in the town of Rochester. 

Amina believes that finding her husband on an online website is not so different from the tradition of arranged marriages in her own country. In the past, Amina would be described as a mail-order bride. However, in this relationship, it is Amina who makes her own choice, not her parents. In fact, her parents encourage her to find an American husband so she will have a more prosperous future. 

Amina had learned British English at Maple Leaf International in Dhaka, which is different from American English. George had to correct her on many occasions. “Americans went to the bathroom, never the loo. They did not live in flats or stow anything in the boot of the car, and under no circumstances did they ever pop outside to smoke a fag.” 

This is just one aspect of the cultural difference Amina experiences by becoming an American housewife. It isn’t just the cross-cultural differences Amina and George are faced with. They also weren’t entirely honest with each other before they got married. 

Amina also has an ulterior motive for marrying an American which isn’t so much about love but about family. She discovers that her idea of family isn’t shared by George. Amina believes that her parents should be where she is. She took it for granted that George would welcome her parents with open arms. However, George is American. He doesn’t believe in living with an extended family. He only considers the nuclear family.

When Amina discovers George’s secret, he reluctantly gives in to her request that her parents come live with them. Now, Amina is heading back to Bangladesh to help her parents with the immigration procedure. But when she returns home, she must deal with her relatives, close and distant, who all believe she is now a rich American wife and can help everybody financially. One of her father’s cousins has gone so far as to try to extort money from the family. She must also deal with her own emotions concerning a man she was once in love with. 

Freudenberger writes a beautifully crafted story where you find yourself hoping that Amina and George will find happiness together and that everything will work out in the end. As with any relationship, cross-cultural or otherwise, I believe it is a simple matter of being honest and communicating from the start. As long as there is love and understanding, I believe any couple can make their marriage a happy and successful one. ~Ernie Hoyt

You’ve Changed: Fake Accents, Feminism, and Other Comedies from Myanmar by Pyae Moe Thet War (Catapult)

What happens when you’re taught a foreign language from birth at the same time that you’re learning your country’s own language? What happens when you’re praised for your success in English while your mother tongue languishes from disuse? What happens when your mouth accommodates sounds not extant in your native language, changing shape as it masters English? What happens when you’re told from the start of your life that English is more important than Myanmar and you’re sent away from home to perfect your mastery of the language of colonizers?

“Not all languages are created equal,” Pyae Moe Thet War learns at an early age. Later she reads in the National Geographic that “one language dies every 14 days,” with 230 vanishing between 1950 and 2010. With each death, a culture disappears. 

Pyae has spent her life fighting to keep her culture close at hand, even as her knowledge of her native language dwindles. In Yangon (still known more widely by its English name of Rangoon), her teachers at international schools struggle with the pronunciation of her name. While many of her friends and her little sister accommodate those in authority by adopting English names, Pyae keeps the name given by her parents, with all of its inherent challenges. 

“But what’s your Christian name,” the mother of her English boyfriend asks, happily ignorant that Pyae has never been Christian. When taking official examinations at school, Pyae is confronted with spaces for first, middle, and last name, while she has none of these. When she separates Moe, Thet, and War into these spaces, she’s faced with a name that isn’t hers. Her western friends stumble over the complexity of her name, although as she points out, “Elizabeth has no more syllables than Pyae Moe Thet War,” and nobody who finds the pronunciation of her name difficult has trouble saying “Elizabeth Taylor.” 

Living in English, Pyae exists without crucial external touchstones with Myanmar culture. In English, there’s no word for hpone, a concept that governs the way Myanmar women should do laundry. Hpone refers to the Buddha nature that every man is born with and every woman lacks. While the stupidest man in Myanmar could possibly embody the next Buddha, Aung San Suu Kyi never could—in fact her undergarments have the power to destroy a man’s hpone. 

For Pyae, hpone clashes with “slut walk” and the Vagina Monologues—and loses. Even in Yangon, Eve Ensler’s play has been staged, although the women in the audience probably still separate their underwear from male apparel when doing laundry. Pyae however does not. In this crucial way, she has stopped being “a good Myanmar woman.”

Instead she’s one of many “Brown people operating in white spaces,” for whom baking a cake becomes a small act of cultural transgression.  A much larger cultural gap destroys her seven-year relationship with an Englishman. If they were to marry, Pyae would lose her Myanmar citizenship and quite possibly her ability to go home again, while her U.K. residency would be predicated upon her husband’s income. Her marriage to a white man would break her father’s heart to the point that he might well disown her. Pyae makes her choice. She now lives alone in Yangon.

The very concept of “alone” is alien to Myanmar culture. Family is community in Pyae’s country and when she goes to a movie by herself, this is inexplicable, if not insane, behavior. Her friends understand but they too are “outside of the village,” as a Myanmar proverb describes nonconformists. When they’re together, they speak “Myanglish,” a hybrid language of English sprinkled with Myanmar phrases. 

Pyae is a writer who can’t write in her native language. Her grandmother and her father will never read her books. “I don’t want this to be a race book,” she tells her western literary agent. But as an English-language writer of nonfiction, from a brown-skinned country whose culture has been overlooked and exoticized, not even Pyae’s well-honed sardonic humor can keep race at bay. From “cake” to “laundry,” language reinforces race with one superiority strengthening the other.  Pyae will always be a “Myanmar writer,” a truth for which we should all be grateful. With English, she illuminates her culture and pillories our own.~Janet Brown 

Malice by Keigo Higashino, tranlated by Alexander O. Smith (Abacus)

Keigo Higashino is one of Japan’s most prolific and popular mystery writers. He has written over fifty novels and many of them have been translated into other languages. A number of his titles have also been adapted for the silver screen. A 2007 television series titled Galileo was based on his series of novels featuring physicist and part-time sleuth, Manabu Yunokawa.

Malice was originally published in Japanese in 1996 with the title Akui. It was released in English in the U.S. in 2014 by Minotaur Books. The Abacus edition was published in 2015 and is translated by Alexander O. Smith. Malice is the first novel in a series to feature Police Detective Kyoichiro Kaga.

The story opens with the death of a writer named Kunihiko Hidaka. Hidaka and his wife Rie were set to move to Vancouver, Canada and this was his last day of living in Japan. Osamu Nonoguchi, a children’s book author and friend of Hidaka and his wife, was scheduled to meet them before their impending move. However, Hidaka wasn’t returning Nonoguchi’s calls so he phones Rie to ask about his friend’s whereabouts. 

Rie was waiting at the hotel for her husband so she did not know he was going to meet with Nonoguchi. When she reaches their home, she and Osamu find Hidaka sitting at his desk in his home office, dead. 

Detective Kyoichiro Kaga is assigned to investigate the case. Nonoguchi is an acquaintance of Koga’s from their days teaching at the same school in the past. Koga became a detective while Nonoguchi became an author. As Kaga begins asking questions, Nonoguchi realizes that Kaga is not reminiscing about old times but that he’s being interrogated and the investigation into his friend’s death has begun. 

As Kaga investigates the case, he feels that Nonoguchi’s statements are a bit off. Something just doesn’t add up. The more Kaga looks into the case, it raises more questions than answers. All of the facts that Kaga uncovers leads him to suspect that it was Nonoguchi who committed the crime. Nonoguchi does not seem surprised to find himself under arrest and asks if he can write his confession. 

Although it seems to be an open and closed case, Detective Kaga is not satisfied with Nonoguchi’s confession. What bothers him the most is that there seems to be no motive for the crime. Kaga refuses to close the case until he can establish a motive. 

The story is written alternatively, as seen through the eyes of the writer Nonoguchi and Detective Kaga. It becomes a game of cat and mouse to see who can outwit who. Higashi not only focuses on the crime but incorporates other themes into his story—bullying, infidelity, extortion which ultlmately leads to murder. 

As we begin to understand the personalities of the characters, then it is we, the readers, who also become detectives as we try to determine the truth of what the characters are saying. Is Nonoguchi’s confession reliable? Does Detective Kaga determine what the motive was for the crime? Once you reach the end of the book, the answers may surprise you. ~Ernie Hoyt

Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin (Knopf)

None of Mom’s children give her much thought until the day she goes missing in a busy Seoul subway station. One minute she’s clutching her husband’s hand as he’s forcing his way down the stairs and then she’s gone. Before he realizes her absence, he’s already packed into a crowded car, unable to leave. When he returns to the spot where he last saw his wife, she has vanished. 

As they begin to search for her, her children realize they barely remember the date of their mother’s birthday.  Mom had merged her celebrations into those of her husband’s, for the sake of convenience. In fact they don’t know her true age, their father tells them, because she’s older than her birth certificate indicates. They don’t have a recent photograph of her because Mom hated having her picture taken and nobody ever pressed the issue. 

When they think of the 69-year-old woman named Park So-nyo who turned out to be really 71, all they can think of is Mom, whose “house was like a factory,” filled with juices and sauces and pastes and fermented fish made by her own hands. All they remember at first when they think of Mom is how she perpetually worried that her children might go hungry and how she always made sure they were fed.

Their search is for a woman whom they barely know, one whose reported sightings are ghostly, in neighborhoods her children left long before.  As they try to understand the mystery of why she didn’t call any of them or why she hasn’t gone to a police station to ask for help, they begin to turn up fragments of memory—the unspoken knowledge that Mom is unable to read, the ignored signs of her ill health, the way she cared for her family unaided when their father temporarily abandoned his household.

As Mom gradually takes shape while still remaining elusive, each member of her family sees dimensions of her that they have constantly overlooked—her curiosity about one daughter’s trips abroad, her longing to read the books written by a child with whom she constantly battles, her hidden devotion to a brother-in-law who killed himself before her children were born, and her connection to “that man,” who is linked to her in a way that always remained a secret.

Mom slowly unfolds like a budding flower, in a shadowed fashion through the eyes of others. Only at the end of her story does she emerge with her own voice, and by then she’s taken on another shape, an unrecognizable form. 

In the relentlessly urban world of modern-day Korea, Mom is embarrassingly rural, only recognized for what she gives and how she nourishes once she has disappeared. Kyung-Sook Shin has created a delicate allegory, a fable built with spiderwebs, carefully and gracefully constructed. Her opening sentence echoes the stark lack of sentiment that characterizes the beginning of Camus’ The Stranger.  The famous “Mother died today. Or was it yesterday,” is matched by “It’s been one week since Mom went missing.” But unlike the narrator of the French classic, Mom’s children find their way into the compassion and tenderness of Shin’s final sentence, voiced to the Pieta, “Please, please look after Mom.”~Janet Brown

The Inugami Clan by Seishi Yokomizo, translated by Yumiko Yamazaki (ICG Muse)

Seishi Yokomizo is a Japanese mystery writer. He is the creator of the popular detective series Kindaichi. Kosuke Kindaichi is an unorthodox and unkempt man who is in his mid-thirties. He is “slightly built, with an unruly mop of hair” and wears “an unfashionable serge kimono and wide-legged pleated hakama trousers, both very wrinkled and worn - and he had a slight tendency to stutter”. 

He is the main character who solved the cases of The Honjin Murders, Gokumon Island, and Yatsuhaka Village, all previously published titles in Japanese with the titles of Honjin Satsujin Jiken, Gokumonto, Yatsuhakamura.

The Inugami Clan is his most popular and well-known novel once again featuring Kosuke Kindaichi. It was translated into English by Yumiko Yamazaki. The book has been adapted into a movie twice by the same director, Kon Ichikawa. The first adaptation was in 1976 which had the international English title of The Inugami Family and again in 2006 with the title The Inugamis.

Sahei Inugami is one of the leading businessmen in an area north of Tokyo. He is the founder of the Inugami Group and is also called the Silk King. His story is the epitome of rags to riches as he was an orphan as a child and a drifter as a young adult. He’s not even sure if his surname is really his own. He was taken in by a kind-hearted priest who nursed him back to health and treated him like his own son. 

Thanks to Daini Nonomiya, the priest of Nasu Temple, not only did Sahei recover. Under Nonomiya’s sponsorship and tutelage, he was educated and became the success that he is today. He never married but has three daughters who were all born of different mothers. He also adopted Tamayo, the granddaughter of his savior and mentor Nonomiya. 

Sahei Inugami is now on his deathbed and his children have gathered at the family home in Nasu. His eldest daughter Matsuko who’s husband died during the war is there with her son Kiyo. The second daughter Takeko and her husband Toranosuke arrive with their son and daughter, Take and Sayoko. The third daughter, Umeko, has come with her husband Kokichi and her son Tomio. 

Sahei Inugami has never trusted the husbands of any one of his daughters and he had no love for them as well. None of the family voiced their true concern—who would inherit the Inugami fortune?

Before Sahei Inugami could make his last wish known, he died. However, he left his last will and testament which is to be read on the first anniversary of his death. 

Kindaichi comes to the Nasu region almost a year after Sahei Inugami’s passing. He has received a strange letter from a man named Toyoichiro Wakabayasi from the Furdate Law Office in Nasu. The law office handles all legal documents associated with the Inugami Group. He has expressed to Kindaichi his fears that members of the Inugami family will be killed and asks that he come to Nasu to investigate the matter.

The day Kindaichi is to speak to Wakabayashi in person, the lawyer is found dead at the inn where Kindaichi is staying. Kindaichi had thought the letter might have been a prank but decided to come to Nasa to speak with Wakabayashi in person. Now he is dead and Kindaichi unwittingly finds himself investigating a new case concerning the Inugami family. 

Yokomizo creates a mystery involving all members of the clan that, without a family tree, may confuse the reader. Its main plot involves an inheritance dispute. Wakabayashi knew it would bring out the worst in all the family members After his death, a series of other murders will occur. Can Kindaichi solve yet another crime that he was only peripherally involved in?. Why did Sahei Inugami write such a convoluted will that leaves his entire fortune to Tamayo who isn’t even a blood relative? The secrets of the family may surprise you! ~Ernie Hoyt

Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back by Janice P. Nimura (W.W. Norton and Company)

The wife of the Meiji Emperor Mutsuhito, Empress Hiroko, was by all accounts a child prodigy. When she was three she could read, she wrote poetry by the time she was five and was a student of calligraphy at seven. Now at 22 in 1871, she is “a modern consort” who joins her husband in welcoming the opening of Japan to Western industry and education.  Under her patronage, five Japanese girls are chosen to live in the U.S for ten years, all expenses paid by Japan, with the goal of receiving Western educations and returning to teach women in their country. 

Of the five, only one has any familiarity with English; six-year-old Ume is able to say “Yes. No. Thank you.” None of them are able to communicate with the American woman chosen as their chaperone during the voyage nor with the stewardess who was meant to bring them food and clean their cabin. Until one of the Japanese diplomats finally comes to check on them, the girls live on the boxes of desserts that were given to them as gifts when they boarded the ship.

In America the girls qre treated as exotic curiosities in San Francisco and on the train journey that takes them to Washington DC. On the train, they are so entranced by the vast outstretches of snow that the oldest becomes snowblind, damaging her eyesight so badly that she’s sent back to Japan along with the girl closest to her in age. Now the remaining three are headed by eleven-year-old Sutematsu, followed by Shige who’s just ten and Ume who had turned seven soon after arriving in the states. The 24-year-old diplomat who had traveled and lived abroad for years and was described as “a Westerner born of Japan” is horrified when the girls are presented to him, especially taken aback by Ume. “They have sent me a baby,” he says with an undiplomatic display of horror.

It becomes obvious that the girls need to be placed in separate homes if they are ever to learn English and become acculturated to Western  ways. Ume remains in Washington with a childless couple who immediately welcome her as their daughter. Sutematsu is placed with the family of a Yale professor and Shige in the home of one of the professor’s friends. All three quickly adapt to the freedom and comfort of Western clothing and and the unaccustomed softness of pillows that aren’t made of wood. Although their hosts receive money for their upkeep, the arrangements made for each girl are “more familial than financial” and within a year of their arrival in America, they have become part of their American families.

They flourish, becoming adept at croquet, chess, and lawn tennis. Ume, alone without Japanese friends, begins to forget her language. Sutematsu has a brother attending Yale who’s adamant that she remain Japanese, keeping her “moral code,” which he ensures by giving his sister lessons in Japanese culture, history, and language. Shige’s family welcome a young Japanese student into their household who is smart, handsome and four years older than Shige. He provides an incentive for her to practice her native language as well as giving her a reason to look forward to returning home.

After several years at Vassar, she is the first one to go back to Japan at the end of her ten year commitment,  engaged to the handsome student. Not as driven as the other two girls, Shige happily becomes a piano teacher in Tokyo. 

Sutematsu however is an academic star. Both she and Ume apply for an additional year in the U.S. in order for them to graduate, Ume from high school and Sutematsu with a bachelor’s degree from Vassar. On the voyage home, they’re both apprehensive. Ume, high-spirited and indulged, finds herself wishing that the missionary passengers aboard ship were “not quite so quiet or good.” Sutematsu, when considering her imminent homecoming, says, “I cannot tell you how I feel but I should like to give one good scream.” 

Japanese public opinion has changed in the decade the girls had spent in America. Western ideas and education are viewed by many as a threat and the idea of educating Japanese daughters is being challenged. Shige, happily married and with limited ambition, repatriates with little difficulty. Sutematsu quickly discovers that marriage is the way to repay her debt to her family and her government. When a highly placed nobleman proposes, she puts aside her idea of having her American sister join her in Tokyo, with the two of them forming an independent household and launching a Western school together, and marries a man much older than she.  “What must be done is a change in the existing state of society, and this can only be accomplished by married women,” she writes to her “sister” in America.

Ume has become thoroughly American and she refuses to give that up. Her value, as she perceives it, is in her mastery of the English language--no matter that she’s without any real fluency in Japanese. Her ambition is to be a spinster, independent with a teaching career, but she soon discovers that in Japan there is no word for spinster and old maids are pitied and disdained. Her stubborn willfulness pays off however. While Sutematsu’s brilliance is turned to the service of enhancing her husband’s career and Shige becomes blissfully domestic, it’s Ume who uses her charm and her determination to become an educator whose name is still known in Japan, with her family name emblazoned on Tsuda College for women and her accomplishments taught in elementary school social studies classes.

Janice Nimura has constructed a framework for the lives of these girls, delving deep into the tradition and history of the samurai class from which they came. Sutematsu was the one most steeped in this background of rigid discipline, having lived through the war between royalist progressives and feudalist warlords when she was old enough to help her family make the bullets that may have wounded her future husband. It was her iron-bound training that made her diverge from the career she trained for into the life of nobility, where her influence extended to establishing charity bazaars and hospital volunteers among the aristocracy. Ume, who had little discipline imposed upon her before her American life, was the one to break through traditional barriers, the ones that Shige welcomed. The stories of three displaced girls and how they prevailed and succeeded is one that deserves greater attention than it’s been given, and through Nimura’s skill and scholarship, this has finally taken place~Janet Brown

Tall Story by Candy Gourlay (David Fickling Books)

Candy Gourlay is a Filipino writer based in the United Kingdom. Tall Story is her debut novel, originally published in hardback in 2010. It has won the National Book Award of the Philippines in 2012 and the Crystal Kite Award for Europe in 2011. It was also shortlisted for a number of other literary awards. 

It centers on the story of two siblings or more precisely, a half-sister and a half-brother. Bernardo, named after his father, lives in a small village called San Andres in the Philippines with his aunt and uncle. He has a mother, a sister named Amandolina, and a step-father named William who all live in London. Bernardo has been waiting for years to get approval from the British government to allow him to move to the U.K. to be with his family. He has been waiting for sixteen years and…he’s still waiting.

Amandolina is thirteen years old but goes by the name of Andi (with an i) and loves playing basketball. Although she’s the “shortest and youngest on the team” she’s chosen as the point guard for her school’s team. It’s a dream come true for her…until her dream is shattered when her mother tells her that they bought a new house and will be moving in two weeks. 

The other biggest news is that the Home Office has finally approved Bernardo’s papers. He will be coming to live with the family in London in two weeks. But here is something special about Bernardo. He isn’t your average, ordinary sixteen-year-old. He is rather tall for his age. In fact, he is taller than any of his peers or the adults that surround him. Bernardo is eight feet tall!

Andi hasn’t seen her brother in ten years. She has only been to the Philippines once in her life, when she was three years old. The only thing she remembers from the trip is that there was a massive earthquake. After that, her mother refuses to take Andi with her to see Bernardo. 

The last time Bernardo’s mother visited, she was surprised by how tall he was. His father was only five-eight, and here he was at fourteen years old and already six foot tall. She took him to the doctor and the doctor said, “There’s nothing wrong with this boy”. Before she flew back to London, she made her sister promise to tell her if Bernardo got any taller. He did, but Auntie and Bernardo never did mention that to his mother, and now this eight-foot young man will be headed to London. 

The people in Bernardo’s barrio believe he is Bernardo Carpio reincarnate. Bernardo tells them that no, “My name is Bernardo, after my father. And my surname is not Carpio. It’s Hipolito. Hi-po-li-to. Bernardo Carpio is a giant, everyone knows that. He’s a story, an old legend.”. But the people look at his eight-foot frame and just laugh. 

It was Old Tibo, the local barber who told Bernardo the story of Bernardo Carpio. He recited the story as he cut Bernardo’s hair. It was a time when Gods and mortals lived together and some fell in love. The children of these mixed marriages were giants, “who looked human but were of a magical size. They may not have been gods but they were immortal - unlike the human side of their families.”.

The giants who chose to stay on earth with their mothers lived peacefully for a time. But as they were immortal, after their mothers died, they people turned against them. Bernardo Carpio decided to fight back with kindness and had become a folk-hero to the people of San Andres. They believe that Bernado Carpio has returned to keep them safe from earthquakes. Who knows what will happen if they find out that Bernardo will be leaving them to live in London? 

The story is written through the eyes of Bernardo and Andi in alternating chapters. It is a coming-of-age story as well as a story of adjusting to a new culture and foreign culture. Gourlay also blends a bit of folklore and magic to add a bit of spice to the story that you won’t want it to end. ~Ernie Hoyt

Little Rabbit by Alyssa Songsiridej (Bloomsbury Publishing)

She’s thirty. He’s in his fifties. He’s established in his art, a  famous choreographer. She’s still emerging into the art she practices, her one novel published by a small press that immediately went out of business. He has a country house in the Berkshires and an apartment with a view in Brooklyn. She lives with a roommate in a Boston suburb. He has a “clean, austere” beauty. She describes herself as “slump-backed and shabby…a hobbity gremlin.” His art is rooted in his body. Hers is within her brain. He leaves bruises behind when they have sex, during which she wears a soft, pink collar. He’s a white cis male. She’s gay, with tinges of bisexuality from encounters with “beta” men; her ethnic background is revealed only in passing, with her description of her mother—”the only Asian American-language poet of her generation.” He calls her Rabbit. She never says his name. 

It’s an easy matter to categorize this novel as 9 ½ Weeks meets “Me Too” but Little Rabbit  takes every assumption and turns it into confetti. “I’m not exactly Lolita,” Rabbit tells the choreographer at the beginning ot their liaison, “You don’t have to treat me like an egg.” In fact, she’s the one to initiate their sex and she’s the one who pushes to learn what lies on the other side of the choreographer’s “careful force.” She’s the one who’s eager to respond to pain and who demands that the choreographer abandons all restraint. She carries her bruises as though they’re gifts, and from this man who insists she’s “not a summer fling,” they’re reluctantly given to her.

He calls her Rabbit, not because she’s cute and tiny, but because he sees her as “small and wild and determined to survive.” “You have a master’s degree, skills. You can have a desk job, do other things, go anywhere. I can do only one thing,” he tells her. When she insists he rip her dress as they have sex, afterward he says “Let me fix it.” She says, “Break me.” He says “I love you.”

Both of them inhabit different forms of art, his made from physical motion, hers from words, and both of them marvel that the other can “take the thing we all use every day and make it art.” When each brings the other into their own work, they approach a painful boundary. When asked if she uses her husband in her poetry, Rabbit’s mother laughs. “Completely. But he knew what he was signing up for.” The choreographer seems to know that too but Rabbit is unsure.

This is a book about differences in economic class, education, sexual preferences, and age. What it is not about is differences in race. During a time in publishing when #ownvoices is the magic hashtag and fiction relies heavily upon racial identity, Rabbit is a writer, a sexual adventurer, a fierce and independent artist. Her bloodline isn’t one of her markers. 

Alyssa Songsiridej makes a bold leap in her first novel. She ignores race and she ignores victimhood. Only in the conclusion does she disclose the names of her puzzling couple, giving them parity without cruelty. Little Rabbit, I promise you, is like nothing you’ve read before. Don’t pass it up.~Janet Brown

Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda, translated by Polly Barton (Soft Skull)

Aoko Matsuda’s book Where the Wild Ladies Are, translated by Polly Barton, won the 2021 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection. It contains seventeen short stories inspired by Japanese folk legends, kabuki theater, and rakugo, a type of comic storytelling art. At the end of the book is a short summary of the inspiration for each story. Originally published in the Japanese language as Obachan-tachi ga iru tokoro by Chuokoron Shinsha in 2016. All the stories have a common theme. The obachan-tachi or “wild ladies” are all ghosts. 

Smartening Up is inspired by the Kabuki play Musume Dojoji (The Maid of Dojo Temple) about a woman named Kiyohime who falls in love with a temple priest. After being rejected a number of times, Kiyohime’s love turns to hatred and she becomes a fire-breathing dragon. The priest runs to Dojo Temple and hides in the temple bell. The dragon coils itself around the bell, breathing out fire until the bell melts and the priest burns to death. 

After coming home from a beauty salon, a young woman is visited by her aunt who hanged herself the previous year after being spurned by a lover. Instead of seeing her son who was the one who found her, the dead woman turns up at her niece’s house to prevent her niece from following in the same footsteps as she herself had and the niece discovers she has a dark power of her own.

The title story, Where the Wild Ladies Are was inspired by a rakugo story titled Hankonko (Soul Summoning Incense). The original story is about a ronin who rings a bell every night much to the consternation of the neighbors. They send a steward to complain to him but he informs the steward that he is saying the rites for his dead wife who gave him the “soul-summoning” incense. Whenever he uses it and rings the bell, she appears before him. The steward asks for some of the incense so he can see his dead wife as well, but the ronin refuses. The steward buys incense with a similar name but when he puts it on the fire, the neighbors only come to complain about the smoke. 

Shigeru, the son of the woman who hanged herself, has started a new job at an incense making company. His job is really simple. All he has to do is “watch the sticks of dried compressed incense that went streaming past him down the conveyor belt, and check that they weren’t misshapen or broken.” But he lost all motivation for work after discovering his mother had hanged herself with a bath towel. After that, he notices that all the employees he works with are middle-aged women. He senses something strange about the company but can’t put a finger to it. He even hears a song from his youth that his mother used to sing to him. As he listens closely, he also realizes it’s his mother’s voice. 

The best description of the entire book can be summed up in one word—quirky! The title of the book seems to be a play on the Maurice Sendak children’s book Where the Wild Things Are which also makes an appearance in one of the stories. There are fifteen other tales which are all linked to each other. Matsuda’s use of well-established stories and interpreting them in her own style makes a unique reading experience. The stories can be enjoyed even more by reading where the inspiration for each story originated. ~Ernie Hoyt

Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat by Veeraporn Nittiprapha, translated by Kong Rithdee (River Books)

Memories of memories, we all have them--stories of when we were small, told to us so often that they become a real and vivid part of our remembered pasts; events we’ve invented, so certain they occurred that they become embedded as false memories; tales about great-grandparents whom we never met but whose exploits are part of our own pantheon of stories that we tell and retell. 

Memory is a realm of evanescence, highly prized and easily lost. It’s the province of ghosts, spiderwebs, soap bubbles. A story emerges, shimmers, and vanishes, crowded out by many others. Which is real? Which is fantasy? 

This is the world where fiction was first invented. This is the world that comes alive in all of its gleaming spirals in Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat. 

Thai author Veeraporn Nitiprapha was brought to the attention of western readers when Kong Rithdee translated her first novel, The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth, into English. Several years later Rithdee has done it again, translating Nitiprapha’s lapidary magic realism while never sacrificing the distinctive flavor of Thai storytelling.

This novel begins slowly with the pace of a tropical afternoon when a boy named Dao explores “a melange of tattered, warped memories,” ones he thinks perhaps were never his own but were given to him by someone else. His world is one of stories told to him by a grandmother who has disappeared from a house where he lives with his mother, a woman whose presence is spectral. Only when he enters the Rain Room does he ever see anyone else, a girl within a large mirror who looks oddly familiar to this boy who has never left his house and has never met a stranger.

Dao is a vessel for memories. He’s the last of what was meant to be a family dynasty, begun by Tong, a man from China whose body is covered with “black freckles like lightless stars…burnt-out constellations.” Tong’s success in his adopted country makes it possible for him to buy the big house near a pond covered with pink lotus blossoms, next to a forest of acacia trees that fill the air with blankets of yellow pollen. Through his house Tong’s children come and go, leaving only their stories behind. 

Truth and lies, success and failure, and the curse of death by water--none of Tong’s children lead happy lives, nor does the generation that follows them. The memories of the family are anchored by history and suffused with poetry. Their stories float through the house and into Dao’s mind like curls of smoke, defying linear rules of time or place. Not until the final pages of the novel is there a shadowy explanation, offered just after the shocking acts of violence that precede Dao’s existence.

Nitiprapha has the gift that made Virginia Woolf famous, one that lets her bend time to her own uses without sacrificing her story. Although Woolf and Garcia Marquez both come to mind while reading her novel, the world Nitiprapha creates is vividly and viscerally Thai. The history, the food, the ghosts, the lingering image-filled descriptions all provide entry points to a place that lives in the memories of memories, fading fast, seen in a blink of time before dissolving into “a fragment of deep longing.”~Janet Brown

The Rice Mother by Rani Manicka (Sceptre)

The Rice Mother is the debut novel by Malaysian-born writer Rani Manicka. It is the multi-generational story of one family, beginning with Lakshimi, the matriarch to six children, three grandchildren, and a great-grandchild. It is a story of love and loss, betrayal and deceit, and of remorse and redemption. 

Lakshmi was born in 1916 in Ceylon, present-day Sri Lanka..At the age of fourteen, Lakshmi is married off to a wealthy man named Ayah who has a job in what is then called Malaya. The man is much older than she, a widower with two children. Unknown to Lakshmi or her mother, they’re deceived by the man’s mother. Lakshmi discovers that he is not the wealthy businessman as he was described to her before the marriage. But with no option of returning home, Lakshmi decides to make the best of her life in this new land. 

Lakshmi has six children. The eldest are the twins Lakshmnan and Mohini. Lakshmnan is everything Lakshmi could hope for in a boy but it’s Mohini that she’s most taken with. She’s given birth to the most beautiful girl the heavens could provide her with. After the twins comes Anna, the strong and reliable daughter, followed by Sevenese who becomes enamored with his neighbor, the snake-charmer’s son. Sevenese also realizes that the snake-charmer’s son is in love with his sister Mohini. The youngest is Lalita, everyone’s favorite. 

Life is mostly peaceful and grand. Then the Japanese come and for the three years of the Japanese Occupation, the Imperial Army commits a number of atrocities that the citizens won’t soon forget. The most devastating blow to the family is the kidnapping and killing of their daughter Mohini. This act will change the lives of all the members of the family. 

Lakshmi becomes inconsolable and turns into a cruel and nearly intolerable presence. Lakshmnan blames himself for his sister’s capture and loses himself to loose women and gambling even though he is married and has three children. Ayah, the father, was also taken by the Imperial Japanese Army, tortured and left for dead. He survives and is only a shadow of his former self.

Of Lakshmnan’s three children, Dimple is the spitting image of Mohini. For Dimple, this is more of a curse than a blessing. Dimple decides to make a “dream trail” by asking and taping everyone in her family to tell their stories so she can understand herself. It isn’t until Dimple’s daughter Nisha grows up and is bequeathed a key from her father that the secrets of the past are unlocked. 

I can’t imagine the suffering of losing a loved one during a time of war or how that death will affect everyone surrounding them, but even if the story is fictional, it can make your own family problems seem trivial in comparison. 

Manicka’s beautiful prose of this family epic sometimes reads as an ongoing storyline of an American soap opera such as Days of Our Lives or One Life to Live, not that that’s a bad thing. She writes in such a way that will have the reader gain an understanding of the customs and manners of Tamil and Malay culture. ~Ernie Hoyt

Walking to Samarkand: The Great Silk Road from Persia to Central Asia by Bernard Ollivier, translated by Dab Golembski (Skyhorse Publishing)

The Turkish bus driver thinks he has a madman on his hands when the French passenger of mature years asks to be let off on a deserted stretch of highway, fifteen minutes from any town. But Bernard Ollivier isn’t your typical lunatic; he’s touched by divine madness. Ten months earlier,  he had succumbed to a violent case of dysentery that stopped him from traveling to Tehran on foot. Now he’s back to health and back on his journey, but this time around he’s going to walk to Samarkand.

When Ollivier became a widower, he submerged his grief in a grand plan. After completing a hike down the Santiago Trail, he decided he would walk the length of the Silk Road, from Istanbul to Xi’an. Now at the age of 62, he’s prepared to complete the second leg of this project and nobody’s going to stop him—not police, immigration officials, nor a dumbfounded bus driver. “I refuse to skip even one inch of this road,” he says, and except for one four-mile jaunt in a friendly Iranian’s jeep, Ollivier keeps his word.

With a portion of his first stage still waiting for him to complete it, he faces an additional 560 miles on top of the 1300 miles of his second trek. Afflicted with what he calls “reckless optimism” and what others might say is pure lunacy, Ollivier, aided with a generous supply of anti-diarrheal medication. is taking this stroll in the summer on a route that will lead him into three ferociously hot deserts. At this time of year, he discovers, the desert is even too hot for camels.

The amount of water Ollivier will need is far too much for him to carry but this man is ingenious. Cobbling together a basic cart from bits and pieces that he finds in local markets, off he goes, managing as much as thirty miles a day, under an “inexplicably blue sky.”

He rapidly falls in love with Iran, a country where people turn radiant with “the sheer joy of meeting a passing stranger.” This possibly saves his life, or at least his journey, because there are only a scant number of places where he can sleep or eat along the Silk Road route. Instead he’s met with hospitality that is culturally ingrained and generously practiced. In addition to food and resting places, Ollivier is offered clandestine vodka, served warm, and puffs of opium. In Iran, smoking taryak is commonplace among laborers and is offered as a matter of course, and although he risks a flogging by accepting the vodka, he turns down the opium.

Instead water becomes his primary addiction; he drinks 12 liters in a matter of hours while making his way through the “fire pit” of the deserts. Facing temperatures that soar as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit, he goes through a “baptism of solar fire,” learning to walk in the early and the evening hours, with a break between 1 and 4 in the afternoon. His skin is rubbed raw by his sweat-soaked clothing as he walks through sand “as soft as skin,” in “waves of shifting gold.” 

“I’m getting high on walking,” he confesses and has to force himself to stop for the day. He finds that six p.m. is the hour of conversation in desert villages and the men who gather to chat at day’s end bring him into their circle, offering hospitality that is often wordless. When a translator is part of the scene, the questions can become unexpected. “Are your teeth your own,” Ollivier is asked by one elderly gentleman.

Ollivier loves Iran, “a welcome interlude of relative cleanliness” between the “pervasive filth” of Turkmenistan and Turkey. But. as a true Frenchman, he’s enchanted by one of his first sights in Turkmenistan, a girl with long blonde hair, wearing a miniskirt. “After three months of chadors, it’s a magical sight,” he admits. And he’s astounded when he reaches the Amu Darya, “not a river, it’s a sea…rushing between two barren banks.”

To cross it, there’s no bridge, only a string of linked barges with a narrow passageway for pedestrians, “more like a horizontal stairway than a bridge.” But soon after he reaches its end, Ollivier is at the Uzbekistan border where the officer in charge allows him entry with a jovial “OK. Go, boy!”

His goal is announced rather prosaically with “a concrete mushroom the size of a water tower,” a far cry from the turquoise-domed roofs Ollivier has dreamed of, but after four months and 1706 miles of walking, he’s not complaining. Samarkand ensnares him. He sleeps for two days, moving only from bed to table and back again, looking back on his “marvelous, extraordinary harvest of encounters.” He spends hours in the bazaars where sensory overload  leaves him “wearier than if I had spent the entire day on the road.” “I could never,” he concludes, “have dreamt of a more exciting, exalting destination than this.”

Still the road beckons. In ten more months, Ollivier will set off on a 1600 mile journey that will take him to China, the Turfan Oasis in Xinjiang Province, the Taklamkan Desert, and into Kashgar. What if, he wonders, instead of educating, “travel actually ‘de-educated you,” by having you think and do things you never thought possible? It’s a de-education that Ollivier, with his humor and his stunning descriptive powers, makes unbelievably enticing. After he completes his four-volume account of his long walk, of which this book is the third, armchair travel will never be the same again.~Janet Brown

Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga (Free Press)

Between the Assassinations is Aravind Adiga’s second published novel, although he wrote it before the acclaimed book, The White Tiger. The title of the book refers to the time between the assassination of India’s then-Prime Minister, Indira Ghandi in 1984 and the assassination of her son, Rajiv Ghandi, who became India’s Prime Minister that same year. It is a collection of short stories set in the fictional city of Kittur which is modeled on Adiga’s hometown of Mangalore in the state of Karnataka.

Kittur is located on the southwestern coast of India, between Goa and Calicut. It is bordered by the Arabian Sea on the west, and by the Kaliamma River to the south and east. The monsoon season starts in June and lasts until September. After that, the weather becomes dry and cool and is suggested as the best time to visit. 

Before each story, we are given a little history of the city and how the town is laid out. In the middle of the town is a pornographic theater called the Angel Talkies. Unfortunately for the town, people give directions by using Angel Talkies as a reference point. We learn that the official language of the city is Kannada, but many of the residents also speak Tulu, which no longer has a written script, and Konkani, which is used by the upper-caste Brahmins. The city has a population of 193, 432 and “only 89 declare themselves to be without caste or religion”. 

The story takes place over a week in the city starting with a visitor’s arrival at the train station. We are first introduced to a twelve-year-old Muslim boy named Ziauddin. He is hired by a man named Ramanna Shetty who runs a tea and samosa place near the railway station. The man tells Ziauddin “it was okay for him to stay. Provided he promised to work hard. And keep away from all hanky-panky”. However, Ziauddin begins to work for a Muslim man who pays him for counting trains and the number of Indian soldiers in them. It isn’t until Ziauddin asks why the man has him counting trains that he understands that his employer is not as kind as he thought.

We meet a man named Abassi who has a case of conscience. He is a shirt factory owner whose employees are going blind from their poor working conditions. He must decide if he should close the factory to save his workers from doing further damage to their eyes, while having to deal with corrupt government officials. 

Ramakrishna, known to the locals as Xerox, sells counterfeit copies of books. He has been arrested a number of times and has been told to stop what he’s doing but he lives to make books and sell them. His latest goal after getting out of jail is to only sell copies of The Satanic Verses by Salmon Rushdie. 

Adiga’s stories are full of characters who deal with an array of problems still affecting India today. Class struggles and religious persecution, poverty, the caste system, and political corruption are just some of the topics covered. The stories reads as satires on Indian life and are filled with humor and angst. Although his description of Kittur makes it seem like a dirty, crowded and dangerous city, you can’t help but want to go and visit it to see it for yourself. ~Ernie Hoyt

Another Bangkok: Reflections on the City by Alex Kerr (Penguin Random House UK)

Alex Kerr made a name for himself as a leading foreign expert on Japan when he won the Shincho Gakugei Literary Prize in 1994 for the best work of nonfiction published that year in Japan. Kerr was the first foreigner to have won this prize with Lost Japan, a book he wrote in Japanese. By that time, Kerr had lived in Japan for seventeen years, the country he had chosen as a home when he was still in his twenties. 

Three years later, Kerr established a second home in Bangkok, dividing his time between Thailand and Japan.  Within five years of that decision, he published Bangkok Found, a book of essays about his new life and what he discovered there. Twelve years later, he expanded upon that theme with new discoveries and a different focus, one that echoes the theme of Lost Japan, “the past and what it has to teach us.”

Another Bangkok is Kerr’s search for the “wellsprings” of culture that underpin the “chaos and ugliness” of Thailand’s primate city. He finds a wealth of “kaleidoscopically complex cultural traditions” that were originally adopted from India, Cambodia, and China and were transformed into an amalgamation that is completely Thai. Sri Lankan stupas and Angkor’s towers have become slender and elongated in their Thai incarnations. The Buddha rose from his seated position and began to walk gracefully under the hands of Sukkothai sculptors. The ceramics of China were translated into vessels of riotous color when Thai craftsmen began to use Benjarong’s five colors, bright, controlled, and dazzlingly ornate. Even Western skyscrapers have taken on surprising shapes as they dominate the Bangkok skyline, using the traditional Thai features of teak pillars and delicately curved roofs. 

Bangkok, Kerr says, is rooted in this sort of adaptivity. The enshrined city pillars are based on the lingam of Angkor. “They’re really Khmer,” a Thai aristocrat told him. The Grand Palace, Thailand’s primary national symbol, is a “treasure house” of elements from different cultures, combined into a glorious extravaganza of “exotic fantasy.”

Kerr finds quite a bit of exotic fantasy in his examination of Thai traditional culture and he writes about it beautifully. His essay on the Grand Palace alone is stunning, giving a whole new view to what has become a visual cliche. But in his following essays, his focus becomes diluted. Traffic jams and tangles of electrical wires invade his examination of Thai floral art and a discursion into sex tourism interrupts his look at classical Thai dance. His own experiences in Bangkok are mentioned in passing, along with some of his memories from Japan, in a way that’s frequently more annoying than it is illuminating. Why, for example, are expats even discussed in a book that purports to be about traditional Thai culture? Not even Kerr seems to know, torn as he is between regarding his own kind as a form of beneficial and creative “yeast” in the city or “a hair in the soup.”

Kerr seems to find comfort in the creation of “a beautiful surface” that’s more important than substantial content, a practice that he finds in Thailand as much as he has in Japan. Another Bangkok slides gracefully over its own beautiful surface, a fusion of memoir and research that’s essentially “charming but trivial,” much more like a series of articles written for a variety of magazines than a thoughtful and coherent book. ~Janet Brown

A Bridge Between Us by Julie Shigekuni (Anchor Books)

Julie Shigekuni is a fifth-generation Japanese American and her first novel, A Bridge Between Us is the story of a Japanese immigrant family. It isn’t about the struggle of being Japanese in America, it is the story of one family, four generations of an immigrant family all living under the same roof. 

The story focuses on four generations of women who live together in a house in San Francisco: Reiko, the matriarch, whose father traveled from Japan with his wife to the U.S. in 1898, Rio, her daughter who is always at odds with her mother, and Tomoe, the wife of Goro, Rio’s son. Tomoe is the mother of two daughters, Nomi and Melodie. 

Each chapter is told through the eyes of one of the main characters. It opens with Reiko talking about the death of her father and how he told her, “Never forget who you are. You are the daughter of a princess.” Reiko has never met her mother. She only knows her through the stories told by her father. She knows that her mother’s name was Misao and whenever Reiko would ask her father, “Where’s Misao now?” Her father would always respond, “She’s visiting her mother in Japan” or “She is in a boat on her way home”. 

Rio starts to tell her story from the bed of her hospital room after an attempted suicide. She starts to reminisce about her relationship with her mother. Tomoe, her daughter-in-law visits her in the hospital and tells her that Granny (Reiko) has been causing trouble again. Nobody in the family understands why she tried to kill herself. It’s Tomoe who says to her, “I know that you must want to live or you would have let go long ago.”

Nomi is only seven years old when her grandmother Rio tried to kill herself. This is her earliest memory. We follow Nomi as she deals with growing pains, trying to please her mother by helping her take care of Grandma Rio and Granny Reiko. She sometimes feels trapped and finds solace in the arms of different boys. She has dreams of going to Japan but doesn’t speak a word of Japanese. At times, she seems to suffer from an identity crisis. 

Tomoe is the pillar of strength among the four women. She is the second oldest of her eight sisters. Her father was a fisherman who one day went out to sea and never came back. She remembers her older sister Miwa taking care of her, while she watched over her six younger sisters. She is the woman who takes care of Reiko and Rio. She also raises her two daughters as best as she can. 

A Bridge Between Us is a story about secrets and betrayals, hopes and dreams. It is not about the difficulties of being Japanese in America or being an American with a Japanese face. It is a story about family and the bonds that bind them—four strong women with four strong personalities covering a span of more than fifty years. 

The story can be dark and depressing at times as Shigekuni takes you on a roller-coaster ride of emotional highs and lows. As with any family, there will always be love and conflict. It is only a matter of how you react to any family situation that you find out what kind of person you really are. ~Ernie Hoyt

Clara’s Diary: An American Girl in Meiji Japan by Clara A. N. Whitney (Kodansha)

Two decades after Commodore Perry’s “Black Ships” came to Tokyo, William Whitney arrived in that city to establish its first national business college in 1875. His wife Anna saw this as an opportunity to advance Christianity in Japan and insisted on coming with her husband, along with their three children. Her daughter Clara was fourteen when she came to the country that would be her home and from the first day of her arrival she recorded the details of her new life with enthusiasm, humor, and careful observation.

It’s easy to be ensnared by Clara’s charm and her honesty that verges on the indiscreet. Within minutes of clearing Customs, she embarks on her first jinriksha ride which she finds “absolutely too ridiculous for anything,” particularly when her father, slower than the rest, is forced to race behind his wife’s conveyance, yelling “Stop!” After two weeks, she’s entrusted with the “keys and apron” of housekeeping, adapting to cooking stoves that are roughly the same size as a flowerpot, noticing the number of handsome Japanese men on the street, and struggling to describe beauty of the purple and gold sunsets that illuminate Fujiyama. Clara is obviously made for living in Japan, and she does that, eventually marrying the son of a highly placed Japanese statesman with whom she had five children, according to the lengthy introduction to this book.  (The Library of Congress brief biography says she had six.)

Her diary is as lively and fascinating as a good romance novel but Clara is too observant to lapse into that category. On her fifteenth birthday she’s taken to the Akusa Kannon Temple,  where she’s fascinated by a statue of the god of health whose face has been so smoothed by the hands of worshippers that it has “neither eyes, nor nose or mouth.” Her Christian viewpoint at first emerges in a ridicule that fades rapidly as her diary progresses--although Clara’s faith is palpable, her interest in rituals and ceremony becomes almost anthropological, without condescension or censure. An earthquake that lasts a full minute and a fire that consumes twenty thousand houses within a six-mile space does nothing to quench her enthusiasm for a place that, within two months, she knows she’ll be sad to leave. 

Political and economic matters are largely ignored by Clara, although a Christmas visit from a young prince of the powerful Tokugawa clan leads to her assessment of his appearance, “very dignified.” Months later she and her mother are invited to the prince’s mansion, where the prince, his attendants, and all of his servants are assembled to greet them. The unexpected reception throws Clara into an unusual speechlessness until everyone takes refuge in the informality of croquet. “Mr. Tokugawa won, of course. (I wonder why he always won?)”

The Whitneys fall under the protection of the Katsu family, whom Clara will later became part of by marriage. Her friendship with the family provides insights into the domestic lives of the Japanese nobility, as well as a bloodcurdling eyewitness account of the earthquake of 1855 that killed 10,000, told to Clara by a survivor. Clara herself is an eyewitness to the funeral procession of the Emperor’s aunt, a parade of foot-soldiers, cavalry, infantry, professional mourners, priests, maids-of-honor, and the nobility taking part in “perhaps the last funeral pageant which shall ever pass through the streets.” 

After three years in Tokyo, Clara is rather harsh in her assessments of the foreign visitors that she meets. Isabella Bird she characterizes as “a very disagreeable old maid,” and when former president U. S. Grant comes to town, she hopes “he will give up drinking so hard.” It’s thanks to the hard-drinking president that she’s witness to a jousting tournament : fencing, archery by mounted horsemen, and equestrian feats, concluded with daytime fireworks in the shape of “ladies, fans, umbrellas, fish, gourds and other amusing things.” A visit to Mrs. Grant takes Clara into the Summer Palace, a place that has the president’s wife in awe. Even Clara is impressed with the “doors and woodwork lacquered with gold molding” and “the walls covered with elegant Japanese screen paper.” She’s less impressed with Mrs. Grant, who “has very few ladylike traits,” when regarded by a young woman schooled in Japanese etiquette.

Although Clara describes several Japanese weddings, she fails to give a picture of her own, or of her life as a wife and mother. When she’s forty, Clara returns to the States with her children and without her husband. She begins to write articles about Japan to supplement the money her husband sends to her from Tokyo.

After almost twenty-five years in Japan, this must have been a difficult, painful transition for Clara and her children that deserves a whole other volume of its own. Her published diary is only ¼ of its original length, part of a “lifetime record” written in English and Japanese that one of her daughters has given to the Library of Congress. Her papers, 75 items in four containers taking up 1.6 linear feet, including speeches, short stories and an unpublished novel, are open to researchers.

However Clara at forty had learned the discretion that Clara at fourteen had yet to acquire. Her journals, at least the ones that have been passed down, end in 1887. Clara left Japan twelve years later, wrapped in the self-containment that she had learned in her adopted country.~Janet Brown

The Complete Story of Sadako Sasaki and the Thousand Paper Cranes by Sue DiCicco and Masahiro Sasaki (Tuttle)

There are many books about the story of the thousand paper cranes which were first created to commemorate the children who lost their lives during the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and for those who suffered afterwards, even many years later, from their exposure to radiation. They have become an international symbol of peace. 

Sadako Sasaki was a twelve-year-old girl whose story has often been repeated in a number of publications. However, author Sue DiCicco says in the preface of this 2020 publication, “So much of what I’ve read about Sadako was contradictory and felt incomplete.” The author wanted more details about her life story, what she went through, and how her family remembers her. 

DiCicco’s curiosity led her to contact Sadako’s brother Maashiro Sasaki. Together, they collaborated on bringing new light to Sadako’s story as seen through the eyes of someone who was there with his little sister when the atomic bomb dropped. Now Tuttle has published The Complete Story of Sadako Sasaki and the Thousand Paper Cranes. 

Sadako Sasaki was born on January 7, 1943. Her father Shigeo owned and ran a barbershop. Her mother, Fujiko, gave birth to her in a neighbor’s rickshaw when he was doing his best to take her to the hospital at four in the morning. They named her Sadako whose kanji character, 禎 means “happiness”. 

On the morning of August 6, 1945 an air raid alarm sounded and all the citizens of the city hurried to go to one of the shelters and listen for the “all clear” signal. The plane had only passed over the city and the “all clear” was sounded. 

As the family was about to eat breakfast, they heard people yelling outside. They also went to investigate. The grandmother was not interested in the airplane and called them back to the table. Just as they sat down at the table, “the city lit up with what seemed like the brightness of a thousand suns, followed immediately by an enormous explosion”. 

The unthinkable had happened. For the first time in history, an atomic bomb was dropped on a populated area of a city, killing an estimated 80,000 people instantly. Sadako Sasaki was only two years old. 

It would be almost ten years later when the affects of the atomic bomb manifested in Sadako. Although her parents did not want to believe it, Sadako was diagnosed with leukemia. It was 1955 and back then leukemia was incurable. 

One day Sadako received a long string of colorful cranes folded for the patients by the Red Cross Youth Club at Aichi Shukutoku High School. Sadako didn’t yet know the significance of its meaning. Her father explained that “giving paper cranes to someone in the hospital means that you hope they’ll get well soon”.

He also told her the legend of the crane. It is said that it can live for one thousand years. “An ancient Japanese legend promises that anyone who folds one thousand cranes, one for each year of a crane’s life, will be granted a wish. This story made cranes a favorite gift for anyone experiencing a life event, especially someone getting married or suffering from an illness.” 

The story inspired Sadako to reach the goal of folding one thousand paper cranes herself. She wanted her wish to come true. She “wanted to be well, to return to school, and to live with her family again”. 

Sadako accomplished her goal but she didn’t get any better. Instead of feeling bitter or sorry for herself, she thought she would just fold another one thousand. Sadako Sasaki died on October 25, 1955 at the tender age of twelve. 

Her death inspired her friends and schoolmates to build a monument in memory of her and of all the children who died from the effects of the atomic bomb. They raised enough money and on May 5, 1958 it was unveiled. It is located in the Memorial Peace Park in Hiroshima, Japan. It has the title of 原爆の子の像 (Genbaku no Ko no Zo) which directly translates to “Atomic Bomb Children Statue”. The title of the monument in English is the “Children’s Peace Monument.” 

Sadako’s story is a story of inspiration and courage. It is also a testament to the horrors of war. The story of her life carries an important message, one that we should take heed of, to strive for peace and to work together to accomplish that goal. ~Ernie Hoyt

Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch by Dai Sijie (Knopf)

Chinese French writer, Dai Sijie, author of the highly acclaimed book Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is back with another morsel of literary delight, Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch. It is his second novel which was originally published in French in 2003 with the title Le complexe de Di. 

It is the story of Mr. Muo, a psychoanalyst who has studied Freud in Paris for a number of years. He has returned to China to ply his trade as an interpreter of dreams. However, Mr. Muo has an ulterior motive for going back to his homeland. He wants to save his unrequited love from his university days, whom he calls Volcano of the Old Moon, who is currently being held as a political prisoner. 

It was a few months prior that Mr. Muo pleaded his case for his university crush to a man known as Judge Di. His argument “rested mainly on ten thousand dollars in cash”. The judge, whose full name is Di Jiangui, was known to be a former member of an elite firing squad during Chairman Mao’s China during the Cultural Revolution. Judge Di had “been the first to establish a fee of one thousand dollars for his pardon of a criminal offence”. 

Unfortunately for Mr. Muo, keeping in step with the rising cost of living, Judge Di had increased his fee tenfold by the time his university crush was arrested. As luck would have it, the lawyer appointed to Volcano of the Moon’s case informs Mr. Muo of an alternative. He tells Mr. Muo,  Judge Di has a weakness for young virgins. If Mr. Muo can find a suitable candidate, he might be able to free his love. 

Mr. Muo convinces his neighbor, a forty-year old embalmer, to help him in his quest to save the love of his life. The Embalmer is a widow whose husband jumped out of the window to his death on the same day as their wedding before consummating the marriage. It turns out he was a closet homosexual. The Embalmer agrees and a date is set but things go awry.

Judge Di has one other passion besides virgins. He is fond of playing mahjong and will often go without eating or sleeping for twenty-four hours. At a recent mahjong game, he had been playing for three days straight, again without eating or sleeping, which caused him to keel over. The Embalmer is given the task of conducting his autopsy. 

The autopsy is a disaster as Judge Di is prematurely declared dead. He woke up believing that the woman in front of him is his virgin to deflower. The Embalmer screams and is later arrested. Mr. Muo believes the authorities will come for him and charge him with being an accomplice to commit murder. And yet, now that Mr. Muo realizes Judge Di is still alive, he feels he might once again be able to help Volcano of the Old Moon. 

And thus begins Mr. Muo’s real journey. His search for a virgin will lead him to a wildlife preserve which is home to one wandering panda. He will visit an insane asylum in the countryside. He will manage to set up shop in the Domestic Workers Market, a place where Mr. Muo “never imagined such a dreamscape existed—a realm of only girls”.  In his quest, he will also face a hostile tribe of men called the Lolo. 

Dai Sijie’s Mr. Muo can be aggravating at times. He is a brilliant intellectual but is lacking in social skills, especially when it comes to women. We learn that he is also a forty-year-old virgin who can discuss sex but has never had sex himself.

Will Mr. Muo be successful in his search? Will he be able to free his university sweetheart? Will communist China welcome the Western study of psychoanalysis? The only way to find out is to follow Mr. Muo in his extraordinary adventure. ~Ernie Hoyt